Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions

Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions

Overview of this book

Cisco Unified Computing System(UCS) provides unique features for the contemporary data centres. Cisco UCS is a unified solution that consolidates computing, network and storage connectivity components along-with centralized management. Cisco UCS reduces TCO and improves scalability and flexibility. Stateless computing blade server's design simplifies the troubleshooting, and Cisco-patented extended memory technology provides higher virtualized servers consolidation results. A hands-on guide to take you through deployment in Cisco UCS. With real-world examples for configuring and deploying Cisco UCS components, this book will prepare you for the practical deployments of Cisco UCS data centre solutions. If you want to learn and enhance your hands-on skills with Cisco UCS solutions, this book is certainly for you. Starting with the description of Cisco UCS equipment options, this hands-on guide then introduces Cisco UCS Emulator which is an excellent resource to practically learn Cisco UCS components' deployment. You will also be introduced to all areas of UCS solutions with practical configuration examples. You will also discover the Cisco UCS Manager, which is the centralized management interface for Cisco UCS. Once you get to know UCS Manager, the book dives deeper into configuring LAN, SAN, identity pools, resource pools, and service profiles for the servers. The book also presents other administration topics including Backup, Restore, user's roles, and high availability cluster configuration. Finally, you will learn about virtualized networking, 3rd party integration tools and testing failure scenarios. You will learn everything you need to know for the rapidly growing Cisco UCS deployments in the real-world.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Looking at the UCS equipment


With the ever increasing demand on datacenters, vendors started focusing on different aspects of server and networking hardware consolidation; however, most of the ad hoc solutions were based on gluing together the existing products which were not designed grounds up to provide a cohesive infrastructure and failed to address the requirements of the datacenter as a whole. Hence, management of these amalgamated solutions was a nightmare for IT administrators.

Cisco entered into the blade server market with a holistic approach to the blade server design. With a strong background in networking and storage products, Cisco developed a cohesive solution consolidating the computing, network, and storage connectivity components along with centralized management of these resources. The purpose of Cisco UCS is to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and improve scalability and flexibility.

Salient features and benefits of the UCS solution include the following:

  • Stateless computing

  • Rapid provisioning of servers

  • Simplified troubleshooting

  • Virtualization readiness

  • Choice of industry-standard form factors

  • Extended memory technology for increased density

Stateless computing

Cisco introduced the idea of stateless computing with its blade server design. Cisco blade servers do not have any initial configuration. Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) for blades, Network Interface Cards (NICs), Media Access Control (MAC) addresses, storage World Wide Node (WWN) numbers, firmware, and BIOS settings are all abstracted from Unified Computing System Manager (UCSM), the management software running on the FIs.

Rapid provisioning of servers

Provisioning of servers dramatically improves as the servers can be provisioned using the UCSM software even before they are physically available. Once the server is physically installed, it will abstract its identity from UCSM. Using server configuration templates, it is therefore possible to create a server template only once and apply the template to hundreds of servers.

Simplified troubleshooting

Replacement of servers also becomes very easy. Since the servers are stateless, as soon as a replacement server is installed, it will abstract all the configuration of the old server and will be available for use. Servers can also be easily migrated for different roles and workloads.

Virtualization readiness

Virtualization in the form of modern bare metal hypervisors is a major breakthrough for optimal utilization of computational resources. Cisco UCS solution supports all major hypervisor platforms including VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen server. Support and integration with VMware vSphere solution is very strong. UCSM can be integrated with vCenter to abstract and manage features at the individual Virtual Machine (VM) level. By leveraging the benefits of virtualization and increasing the density of the physical server, the UCS solution can scale up to thousands of VMs.

Choice of industry-standard form factors

Cisco UCS servers are available in two categories: B-series blade servers and C-series rack-mount servers. Both form factors are designed using the same industry-standard components and can address different computational requirements. Both B-series blade servers and C-series rack-mount servers are designed using Intel Xeon CPUs. B-series servers are managed through UCSM, whereas C-series servers can either be individually managed or can be integrated to UCSM.

Extended memory technology for increased density

Cisco also introduced a patented extended memory technology for two CPU socket servers to increase the total amount of memory support; this could be more than double the amount of memory as compared to the industry standards for two socket servers. Virtualized workloads can leverage this extra memory to support an even greater density of VMs in a reduced physical footprint, resulting in reduced Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX) costs. Extended memory technology is available in both B-series blade servers and C-series rack-mount servers.